Mark Adams smiled serenely as an industrial-sized Roto-Rooter truck noisily sucked thousands of gallons of raw sewage from a stinking pond.
"In some ways I have been training for this for the last 10 years," he said, as the air around him began smelling more and more like a giant outhouse. "Now all of the pieces have fallen into place."
Wearing a blue polo shirt, slacks and sunglasses, the neatly pressed Santa Monica lawyer seemed at ease, at home even, in the crumbling, sunbaked slum known as Duroville.
U.S. District Judge Stephen Larson last month appointed Adams, 57, temporary receiver of the infamous trailer park. That makes him, as Adams put it, "the new sheriff in town" and he hasn't worn his authority lightly.
He immediately ordered drug tests for all park employees, firing three who refused to take part. Signs went up telling tenants to keep their dogs in the yard or lose them to the pound. All street parking has been banned under threat of towing. Four of eight backed up sewage ponds are being drained.
When the owners of a small market and a nearby clothing shop balked at hiring a security guard to keep drunks from loitering, Adams reminded them that he could replace their businesses with other ones or simply have them evicted.
They grudgingly agreed to split the cost for a guard.
"Maybe I can hire my son-in-law to do it," said Jose Carello, owner of Silvia's Market. "I wonder how much you have to pay them an hour? Do they need a uniform?"
A full-time security force, complete with uniforms and cars resembling police vehicles, has been hired to patrol the park.
Electricians inspected the 276 trailers and found 30 in need of immediate repair. In 10 trailers, the toilets had rotted through the floors and were sitting on the ground.
"I have cleaned up slums all over California but have taken on nothing as daunting as Duroville," Adams said, as he strode the dusty roads between densely packed trailers. "The magnitude of this is amazing."
His task is to do emergency repairs and take control of park finances. After 60 days he will make a recommendation to Larson on whether Duroville should stay open or be closed.
"There are a lot of imminent dangers to people who live here," he said. "In the short term we can take steps to make it habitable. Whether we could do that permanently, that is up to Judge Larson."
